Dr Vonk, an assistant professor in psychology at
Oakland University said that the North American black bears were first
trained to understand the process and equipment involved in the tests.

"This is the first published work with bears working on a touch screen,"
she said. "It hasn't been done with any large carnivores."

The experiment then involved presenting the bears with two sets of dots
or "arrays".

"Basically we were looking to see if they can understand to choose less
or choose more," she said.

They touched the screen to select one or other of the arrays, and were
given food if they got the answer right.

One bear was rewarded for touching the screen with a greater number dots,
and for the other two bears, a correct answer was an array with a fewer
number of dots.

The team wanted to ensure that the animals were not merely estimating
magnitude, a skill that has been shown by many animals.

"We're really trying to differentiate between the ability to perceptually
discriminate amount from actually quantifying a number of items," explained
Dr Vonk.

So the team varied the pattern of the dots and the shaded area on which
the arrays were shown, and in some tests the dots were also moving.

North
American black bears benefit from being able to turn their hand to wide
range of tasks

"If there's more dots and less area covered - it's a better indication
that they actually do something analogous to counting rather than just
estimating the amount of something," Dr Vonk said.

Although the study found that bears did better when the size of the area
corresponded to the number of dots, they also found that the bears were
capable of compensating for an area that was smaller or larger than normal
for the number of dots it contained.

"What was important is that we showed that they could work against that
in some of the tests," Dr Vonk said.

Black bears in the wild are often solitary, non-social animals, so the
results suggested that animals that do not live in a group may have the
ability to make number-based judgements.

"This is really the first test of a species that has not evolved to live
socially to see if they can individuate items," she said.

"I think we can't really say that they're absolutely counting at this
point but it does look like they're attending to the number of items and not
just the area."

Similar tests on primate species allowed the scientists to compare the
ability of the black bears with non-human primates.

For at least one of the bears, they found a pattern that matched.

These results are among the first to show that bears may have cognitive
abilities that are equal to primates.

"I've been working for a while with these bears... but simultaneously I
was working with a chimpanzee," said Dr Vonk.

"I find that their abilities so far in terms of categorisation and
forming more abstract concepts seem quite comparable."

The techniques used to research the bears' skills could be used in the
future to look at bear cognition in more depth.

"It really opens up the door to asking all kinds of comparative and
cognitive questions with a species that really hasn't been investigated in
that way before," she said.